(À propos, Mrs. Carteret sometimes complained that her guests came to see her only because they wanted to see the garden; or, alternatively, that when they came they never cast an eye on the garden (Palladio? Sansovino?), which was one of the treasures of Venice.)
I was offended by her refusal to see my parents again on such a feeble, pseudo-meteorological excuse, but I realized that I had mistaken her nature, and it was my fault, more than hers.
No, it may have been a perhaps perverted and unrealizable wish on the part of Anna (Hannah) to keep up standards, of whatever sort, that made her look so critically on the outside world. From her ivory tower she could afford to, in every sense of the word.
Another episode occurs to me. An old friend of mine and an old acquaintance of Mrs. Carteret’s, came to stay with me. In her beautiful house in Chelsea she kept a salon to which the old, and even more the young, were only too glad to be invited.
When I asked Mrs. Carteret if I might bring my old friend (and hers) to call, her brow furrowed. ‘This Boadicea of the South,’ she said, ‘cannot possibly receive this Messalina of the North—and she added in a lower tone, and with a slight closing of the eyelids, ‘You know how quickly news travels in Venice. When I told my dear Maria that the daughter of an eminent Bishop might be coming to lunch, she replied, “But Signora, how can a Bishop possibly have a daughter?”.’
‘She is not staying here,’ said Mrs. Carteret, to make the position perfectly plain, ‘she is staying with a friend whom you know.’ (She didn’t mention my name.) ‘It is not for us to judge. Of course, heretics have different ideas from ours, but many of them are good people according to their lights, and so on Friday (no, not on Friday, which is a fast day for us) we will have—and a long list of comestibles permitted by the Church followed.
But it must not be supposed that Mr. and Mrs. Carteret satisfied their romantic longings by receiving the more important visitors to Venice or (by what gave them perhaps greater pleasure) refusing to receive those who were less important. Their romanticism went further than the bounds of snobbery and super-snobbery in which to some extent it fulfilled itself.
Mr. Carteret had his pictures on the walls of the ante-room. He had no reason to be ashamed of them and when visitors praised them and asked him why he had given up painting—‘Oh don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t!’—he would exclaim, and make his usual excuse for having stopped painting when he began to mingle with the rich and great.
Mrs. Carteret owed no apologies to anyone. She did not feel the need to exhibit her rather laborious knowledge of foreign languages, accurate and impressive as it was, and acquired—who knows how?—in holes and corners of New York, or her considerable knowledge of art and literature which she perhaps felt was beneath her, to any so-and-so who had been admitted to her presence.
In her case, as in his, this was a kind of negative romanticism, the rich, cultured, high-born American keeping the profane, vulgar, at bay.
Yet true romanticism demands more than negation and disapprovaclass="underline" it demands a positive gesture, something creative, something to hand down to the ages.
It happened before my time, and how it happened I never knew, but rumour told me it happened this wise. Mr. and Mrs. Carteret gave an evening party after dinner in the height of summer, to which everyone who was anyone was invited.
Refreshments no doubt were served, perhaps under the light of gondola lanterns, antique and modern: I can imagine their ghostly glimmering.
As the warm evening drew to its close, and the mosquitoes began to make their unwelcome attentions, there was a sudden movement, and there emerged from among the bushes, towards and around the fountain, a rush, a displacement of air quite indescribable—and there, said the guests, who could none of them afterwards agree, were a nymph and a shepherd, representing Mrs. and Mr Carteret. For two or three minutes, hand in hand and foot by foot, they encircled the dim sub-aqueous shimmer of the fountain, frolicking and kicking their heels. Then other lights were turned on, fairy-lights away in the garden, and Mr. and Mrs. Carteret in a guise that was never agreed upon, ushered their guests out.
So no one ever knew for certain, though speculations were rife, what costumes Mr. and Mrs. Carteret had worn for their middle-aged pastoral idyll. Some went so far as to say they had worn nothing; while others said the whole thing was a hoax and the figures clothed or unclothed, that issued from the bushes and danced round the fountain had been hired by Mr. and Mrs. Carteret to give the impression of an old-time Venetian bal masqué.
Was this extraordinary exhibition the object of the party—to show Mr. and Mrs. Carteret in their primeval youth?
The guests never knew; they made their farewells and their exits not knowing what to say, and leaving the shepherd and the shepherdess in the darkness.
The incident was often referred to by their friends, but not by Mr. and Mrs. Carteret. They lived out, and outlived, their innate earlier romanticism and did not repeat the experiment. There were no more shepherds and shepherdesses in the garden (Palladio? Sansovino?). Only properly attired fashionable guests (with one exception) were entertained there.
Among the yearly visitors to the Palazzo Contarini dal Molo, was one who always escaped Mrs. Carteret’s lively censure. This was Princess X, who came from a distant mid-European country, but who sometimes deigned to set foot in Venice. For Mrs. Carteret, Princess X could do no wrong. In the early autumn I used to be warned, ‘Someone interesting is coming to stay with us. I hope you will be here.’ The ‘someone’ was never mentioned by name, but I knew who she was. Her sojourns at the Palazzo Contarini dal Molo were brief, but they were much prepared for and looked forward to. When the princess finally arrived after adequate arrangements had been made, she did something which Mrs. Carteret would not have tolerated in anyone else. She was at least half an hour late for every meal. Lateness was something Mrs. Carteret bitterly resented: as she sometimes said to a belated guest, ‘Better never than late.’ But not to Princess X, whose late appearances were designed to make an impression. Wearing her famous emeralds, and her fading beauty, she would walk into the ante-room, looking vaguely around her, as if time was of no consequence, and Mrs. Carteret would rise laboriously to her feet and her husband more agilely to his, to greet her.
‘Dear Princess!’
This was in the middle and late thirties, before the Abyssinian War, and Sanctions, which made relationships between our two countries increasingly difficult. Mr. and Mrs. Carteret, besides being by birth Americans, were old enough to be above the battle; they did not much care what happened so long as it did not happen to them in their secure peninsula of beauty. They were, if anything, for Mussolini who protected what they stood and reclined for. But the other Anglo-American inhabitants of Venice were not in such a happy case, and as the fatal year drew on, they also withdrew, as I did. Exactly what happened to the Carterets when war was declared I never knew. Rumours I did hear, many years later, when I came back to Venice. Mr. Carteret had retired to the South of France, where he died, leaving the Allied cause a large sum of money. Anna had predeceased him, perhaps in the first year of the war, perhaps before. We corresponded with each other until letters no longer reached their destination. Our fragile friendship was overwhelmed in the universal cataclysm.
When I went back after the war there were many changes: the Palazzo Contarini dal Molo had passed into other hands, hands as unlike those of its previous owners as could well be imagined. The suore (the nuns of Santa Chiara, that noble and austere sisterhood) had bought it, and could there be anything more unlike its present situation and meaning to the world outside than it had in the days of Mr. and Mrs. Carteret? The worldly and the other-worldly could not have been more violently contrasted. The only resemblance between its present and its former owners was the extreme difficulty of being received. The nuns, by rules ordained by their illustrious foundress, could not receive people from the outside world. Those who wanted admission had to have special reasons, religious passports so to speak, before they could be let in. In the Carterets’ day it had been just as difficult to obtain admittance; but how different were the obstacles then! Then they were purely social; now they were purely spiritual.